The Keeper of the Walls (29 page)

For the first time in months—in years—her body wasn't quietly trembling, and her heart was beating normally. It all had to do with Misha, then —with her feelings. She'd opened the door to Rabbi Weill, and told him about the anger and the hatred. She thought: I hate my husband. For four years, I've been living with a man I hate.

She slipped into a gown of soft satin, the edges trimmed with Brussels lace. She thought then of her grandfather, of the Rumanian grandmother she'd never known. All the women in our family have led tragic lives, she thought with consternation. One can't escape one's destiny. And she wondered about Kira's future. Kira, whom she'd always considered more Misha's child than hers. But she'd been wrong. This line of women was going to be carried on by Kira, not by Nicky. It would be she who, one day, would bring a new child into the tradition brought over to Western Europe by the young Rumanian girl who had married her grandfather.

She picked up the silver frame on the vanity, and stared with strange detachment at the photograph of Prince Mikhail Ivanovitch Brasilov. Those arrogant eyes that thought they had all the answers—that cleft chin, which she'd thought vulnerable, but which, really, was just another point of vanity to him. She said, aloud, without passion: “I hate you. But I'm not going to leave you. Because my children need me—and they need my mother, and Jacques. We don't think we're perfect, like the Brasilovs. But we know how to love, and how to express our love. I'll stay with you because I have to, because I don't know what else to do. But from now on, I'll never forget that you are the stranger—the outsider Wolf and my mother told me about. And I'll never let you touch my heart again, or betray my soul.”

M
isha returned
the night of the day that President Paul Doumer was murdered. In late afternoon, Lily opened the door to Sudarskaya, whose face was alive with an incredible excitement, and as the round little music teacher took off her jacket, she exclaimed: “They've shot the President!”

Arkhippe, who had taken her coat, moved closer, disbelief on his features. “It can't be true,' Lily said.

“But I swear it
is!
In the bus they said it was a Russian, and that they've lynched him.”

Nicky was running out into the hall, his hair still wet from his bath, his sister on his tail in her bathrobe. “Mama! What happened?”

“You children stay quiet, and Arkhippe will go to the corner stand and bring us back a newspaper. Now, Raïssa Markovna is here to give you your piano lessons.”

Lily clasped the little woman's arm, and pressed it. Nicky had already turned around, in the direction of the living room, but Kira, her eyes wide, had stayed at her side. Lily whispered: “Raïssa Markovna, for God's sake, pull yourself together.”

But she realized that she, too, was shaking. Moments later, Arkhippe came back, holding a newspaper out to her: “Madame Sudarskaya was right, Madame la Princesse. It was at the veterans' book sale. There were three, or four, or maybe five shots.”

“Is he dead?” she asked, feeling her voice quivering.

“Not yet, Madame.”

Kira pressed close to her. “Mama, what happens when a President of the Republic dies?”

“The Chamber has to elect a new one. But we have to pray that President Doumer survives, darling.”

“Was he a good man?”

She looked up briefly to see her son and Sudarskaya, both seated on the piano bench, staring at her, their hands inert. Feelingly ridiculous, she answered: “I really don't know. I didn't know much about him. I'm sure he was a kind man, who loved his family. He was only our President for a year—and I don't always understand much about politics. He was a man of the Right—like your Papa. He didn't deserve to be hurt.”

“I want Papa to come home,” Kira said, beginning to cry.

Lily put an arm around her daughter, and sighed. “Raïssa Markovna, it's useless to try to work today. Children—go to Zelle. You'll have your supper, and then you can come out to be with us a while. Raïssa Markovna—you'll stay and eat with me?”

There was a scramble as Nicky descended from the bench, and Sudarskaya waddled over, her cheeks red. The little boy took his sister's hand, started to pull her toward the hallway, but she resisted. “I don't want to go to Zelle. I want to stay right here with Mama.”

Lily pressed a handkerchief over her eyes, and went to sit down in the study. The little group followed her. She didn't resist. The children sat beside her, huddling close to the warmth of her body. Sudarskaya said, in her wailing tone: “What's the world coming to? Now the French will hate the Russians even more than before. We need them to protect us from the German menace. And what will this do to the Jews?”

Lily asked: “What do you mean?”

“I'm speaking about that man Hitler, in Germany. He gained two million votes in the last election.”

“But he still lost to Hindenburg.”

“Fine difference,” Sudarskaya scoffed. “A war criminal and a Nazi.”

“But the German chancellor just dissolved Hitler's private armies.”

“That was a risky thing to do. At the temple, they were speaking about Hitler, and about what he stands for—this super-race idea.”

“And you understood it?” Lily questioned gently.

The little music teacher shook her head. “No. But I was afraid. There's no place anywhere for the Jews. That's one thing I do understand, Lily. In Russia, we were restricted to the Pale of Settlement, and we weren't granted citizenship. In Germany, there's an Austrian man who wants to get us out. And here—every day, there's a new article coming out with talk that links us with the Communists. We can't win for losing.”

“What's a Jew?” Kira asked.

“A poor lost soul whom nobody wants,” Sudarskaya replied ironically. “And you're lucky, my little girl, that your parents are Christian. That way, you'll never be hurt.”

“It sounds unfair,” Nicky said. “At the lycée, there's a Jewish boy called Maurice. He's nice. We play together sometimes.”

“That's ‘cause you
always
choose to go with kids nobody likes,” Kira taunted him.

“But it's not true. Everybody likes Maurice.”

“And everybody likes my friend Maryse, and her husband. Raïssa Markovna was just teasing you right now. The Jews, Kira, were some of the first people to believe in God. They wrote the Old Testament. Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

“And God knows, nobody liked
him,
” Sudarskaya cut in.

Lily said, to change the subject: “My brother's in Germany right now. Misha sent him there for some business reason. Somehow, with those National Socialists, I'd prefer to have him home.”

“See? You don't like the Nazis any more than I do,” Sudarskaya declared. “But you have no reason to be afraid. Your brother's not a Jew.”

Lily closed her eyes for a moment, and a mental image of Claude pressed across the inside of her eyelids. Claude, with his matte skin, and his dark eyes, and his aquiline nose. She thought, remembering Julien Weill's nose, and Wolf Steiner's father's skin color: Claude is a Jew—one hundred percent a Jew. And she wondered then if this showed on her face, too. If so, had anyone else noticed it? And if they had . . . there was Nicky's face, too, so much like hers, so much like Claire's. Dark, Jewish faces, all of them.

“The whole world's a mess,' Sudarskaya sighed. “If I could choose to be somewhere, I don't know where that would be.”

Hours later, with the children in bed, Lily and Sudarskaya stayed together in the study, listening to the radio. And when Misha came home, surprising them, Lily rushed to him without thinking, letting his arms go around her to protect her. He greeted Sudarskaya with unexpected warmth. “I'm glad Lily wasn't alone,” he told her. “Thank you for staying.”

After François had driven Sudarskaya home, Lily asked him about his trip, and for the first time, noticed how exhausted he looked, how peaked and drained. He took her hand, stroked it absently. “Things are very bad,” he murmured. “Everywhere around me, the economy is collapsing. All the good that Poincaré accomplished seems to have been washed away. We're entering the slump that America and Great Britain felt before us.”

“And Brasilov Enterprises?”

He looked away. “Somehow,” he said, “we'll have to pull through. We've done it before, Lily. One missed harvest can't mean the end of the world.”

She sat watching him. Part of her wanted to be sympathetic, but she could feel a glass panel between herself and him, between what she vaguely felt she should do—open her arms to him, offer him comfort—and what, in effect, she felt capable of doing: absolutely nothing. She watched him suffer, and a sudden, vengeful flare came into her heart: Suffer, Misha Brasilov, for your unimportant little Enterprises! What was this suffering worth, compared to her own sense of loss? He was speaking to her about a business, and she had lost a child, a living, human child!

And yet, when the flare died down, she did feel compelled to hold out her hand, in a halfhearted gesture of compassion. “It's late,” she said. “We should both go to sleep.”

T
he next day
, Saturday, May 7, they learned that Paul Doumer had died at two forty in the morning, and that the man who had shot him was a Russian called Gorguloff. The authorities were certain that he was carrying false papers. He claimed to be from the Kuban River area, and had been a doctor in Prague, where he had been considered unbalanced. In France, he had been denied a residence permit, and had been living in Monaco since the previous autumn. Few people knew him, and his reputation was bad.

On May 9, Lily organized the children's piano practice, and went out in a glacial windstorm at three thirty, to see the President's body exposed in a casket at the Élysée Palace. The crowd was thick, beginning at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, extending along Rue de l'Élysée to the Avenue Gabriel, and into the Rue Boissy-d'Anglas. She left the car, and tried to forge her way through, but backs and hats blocked the view. And so she turned back, and had François drive her to the offices of Brasilov Enterprises. Misha was out, but her father-in-law, looking very gaunt, slipped on his overcoat and took her for tea at the Thé de la Madeleine. They tried to speak of the children, of women's fashions, of Claire and Jacques. But after half an hour, they both fell silent, looking at their hands.

On Tuesday, May 10, the Chamber at Versailles elected Albert Lebrun the new President of the Republic, and Lily met Misha for a quick dinner at the Restaurant Mozart. His face was drawn, and she could see he'd hardly slept. They held hands over the tablecloth, and he said: “Hundreds of thousands of francs, Lily. The bastards have made off with hundreds of thousands of Brasilov francs. Not to speak of the harvest that will never be, and the millions lost there.”

“Who made off with this money, Misha?” She'd never heard him speak like this before, with such total discouragement. And it was the first time, too, that he had allowed himself to discuss his business with her.

“The Rabinovitches of Munich. Claude went to get the money back— they'd sold us first-quality materials, for the building of our refinery in the Aisne, and the things that arrived were all defective. But of course they'd left town, without a trace.”

She took this all in, feeling totally numb, and suddenly afraid. Hundreds of thousands of francs . . . millions. Sums that boggled the mind. Lost. “You can't do anything?” she asked.

He stared at her, his eyes bloodshot, and made a fist that he banged upon the table. “Goddamned kikes,” he whispered. “They deserve everything that's in store for them!”

She blinked, growing cold. In a small voice, she asked: “What's in store for them?”

But he had closed his eyes, and was pressing his fingers to his temples in a desperate gesture that moved her deep inside. He was a man, he was her husband, whom she'd married in love. She'd thought, many times, about how to manage without him—about how to leave him and take the children with her, escaping from the hypocrisy of their life together. But that night, at the Restaurant Mozart, she could only think of how lucky she was not to be Madame Paul Doumer, whose husband lay in a casket. She whispered, urgently: “It's going to be all right. We'll survive, somehow. Don't worry so much.”